


Reflex

by TalkingAnimals



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Discussion of character death, F/F, even though they don't...stay dead, in a fade to black sort of way, sex mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-24
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-03-13 12:22:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18940861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TalkingAnimals/pseuds/TalkingAnimals
Summary: You tell yourself, for a while, when Daisy is freshly dead, that you appreciate Melanie for her practical contributions. That her rational, calculated approach to conflict is something you appreciate on its tangible rewards alone. That your fixation on the way her muscles rumble under the hem of her shorts as her feet rocket her along the wooden floors is simply the study of a competent fighter. When she looks up at you, chest heaving, under the slick wire of hair clinging to the sweat on her face, you entertain the last slivers of the idea that your appreciation is detached, aesthetic.But you’ve never been good at lying to yourself.





	Reflex

You try to tell yourself you don’t feel betrayed by her leaving. You’ve never been good at lying to yourself, but you try this time, for Daisy’s sake. Life or death, right? That was the nature of the assignment. So when she returns, full to bursting with life unlived, the unexpected dip in the road from _being_ to _not_ , you try to pretend you aren’t angry.

For her sake.

But you’ve never been good at lying to yourself.

Because she was supposed to be a pillar of decision, wasn’t she? A monument to action. Swathed in the Hunt, the tight, bloody embrace of a step too slow and a neck quickly broken. There was no room for indecision or middle ground with the Daisy you’d known: She had gone in, she had failed. The corners of the cloth binding her legacy together were bound tightly, final in your mind. Daisy was, spit of fire and violence and forward momentum, and then she wasn’t – against a cracking split of her bones, blood turning to dust in the heat of the rumbling fire. A violent wound on the earth, cauterized.

These were not feelings about Daisy you let yourself process when she was alive. When you _knew_ she was alive. Cord to your heart and your mind cut, the blood was a trickle, then it was a flood: A wave enveloping the back of your brain, hugging the inside of your skull: hurt, anger, the transient nature of safety.

When you make it out and she doesn’t, you are disappointed, but life without her is no scarier than life with her. It’s not safer, either, but there is a space inside you: carved out for a breath, a space to feel the rumbling of anger and misdirected violence you had partnered with for so long. To feel its absence.

Daisy, in theory, had not been distinct from the institution that had torn the reputation, the history from its servants in death. You hadn’t known her in theory, though. In practice, Daisy was hilarious. Vulnerable. Loud and raucous and gay and whiskey-slamming after work and pointing those eyes across the bar with that hunter’s intensity, slapping you on the arm when she sniffed out some uncomfortable figure in a corner that _clearly_ had something to hide. That she could stare down and laugh about off duty, roping you into the casual thrill, the joke of civilian terror.

When she is gone, though, she becomes re-united with theory: with idea. You feel her memory over those days, then weeks, as it sinks into the ephemera of every officer stringing together the bulk of your resentment. It was hard, then, not to process her as you’d processed the others when you’d left: how they’d treat you if the entities got to you first, what history they would formulate to represent your sacrifice.

Daisy had only motivation not to do it to _you_.

You tell yourself, for a while, when Daisy is freshly dead, that you appreciate Melanie for her practical contributions. That her rational, calculated approach to conflict is something you appreciate on its tangible rewards alone. That your fixation on the way her muscles rumble under the hem of her shorts as her feet rocket her along the wooden floors is simply the study of a competent fighter. When she looks up at you, chest heaving, under the slick wire of hair clinging to the sweat on her face, you entertain the last slivers of the idea that your appreciation is detached, aesthetic.

But when she grabs you one night against an archive bookshelf, you don’t stop her. Don’t question. She is ferocious and urgent, slick on your mouth with the hot, wet intensity that permeates her entire life. You can feel the sweat on the hands that border your neck, feel the rigidity of her as she pulls her chest flush against yours. Small boobs, taught arms, wiry and electric against your own as her tongue runs over your bottom lip.

There is no sentimentality to the urgency, nothing about the way her hand grips the small of your back under the folds of your shirt that tells you this is anything but a rehearsed formula. It doesn’t offend you, your finger looping into one stitch of her braids, digging at the housing of her mind: you breathe it in as an aspect of her. You feel the weight of her hand, rehearsed and mechanic on your skin, and the way she needs you bleeds into your pores. Impersonal is not inhuman, and as your shirt lifts up and your skin connects with the bookshelf behind you, you feel the leather of a book on your spine: skin to skin.

Later, winded, she is pulling the sweat-soaked hair off her forehead, propped up on a locked arm as she catches her breath. You are slinging the arm of your coveralls back up, manufacturing a facade of professionalism for anyone else knocking around the stacks at one in the morning.

“Is it weird I always wanna go for a run after?”

“Can’t say I have strong feelings about it. I say go for it, if you don’t mind the potential judgement from the big eyeball in the sky.”

“Don’t remind me. At least I won’t be _saying_ anything.”

She shoves a thumb into her sneaker, pops her heel into place.

“Right. well, I’ll see you in a few, then.”

“Don’t feel obligated. I’m not keeping you.”

“I’ll see you in a _few_ , Basira.”

“Alright.

"Looking forward to it.”

She peels out the door, tight slap of her sneakers bouncing back into your ears until she treads around a corner, leaves you in silence. You trace your finger down a book’s spine behind you, let your mind wander, un-tethered for a rare moment. Let the idea of Melanie sit on you, dig through the snapshot memories of her popping a rare joke off on the nights you’d spent alone in the archives, of her ability to actually sit down and shut the fuck up when you were both occupying a piece of space together. You try not to entertain too much sentimentality as your hand pulls lightly on the pages and covers of books along your back, but it’s hard not to sit in a breath of quiet and think about her: solid and angry and whole. Float in and out of the feelings of _study_ to _appreciation_ to _intimacy_ and how they’re built on the backs of pain and terror. How even the way in which Melanie needs other people is practical, and how the formula that makes her seem cruel makes her precious: a congealing of need and growth. You let yourself sit for just a moment in the afterglow, though, as you pause on the thought of her hands: over the bitten nails and the freckled skin and on the way they twitch so wildly on the bony cusps of her wrists. They way one holds a knife and the other steadies your back and you don’t, for a minute, feel afraid.

Like her, but not.

Need and growth, need and growth.

She is wiping an arm over her forehead when she returns, treads squeaking lightly as she pulls her way back into the space. When she bends down to grab her shirt, soak up the sweat on her sports bra with the crumpled cotton, she remembers herself for a moment: stumbles into a patch of thought not racing, and bends down to kiss you. Even the muscles in her lips are tense as her fingers frame the side of your face with just enough pressure to tell they’re there. When she stands back up, she is stretching an arm behind her head, pacing with that same quiet burble of energy you’re so used to watching in her.

“I always think it might help with the anger, you know? Get some of that energy out.” You hear a wet _pop_ as she cracks her back, rolls her head between her shoulders.

“Really doesn’t do much. Just end up _sweaty_ and mad instead.”

“Nothing wrong with being in shape if you’ve got to be unhappy.” You muse, finger finally circling a book long enough to make a commitment. She laughs: a short, tight wheeze, and the two of you resign to silence as you bury yourself in the occupation of your drives: god of brain and spirit of brawn.

When you and Jon betray her, it is without company that you read once more: alone with your ethereal escort in the quiet of the archives. The re-adjust to the mundanity of servitude, the flattened reality of work, communion, work.

No one checks on you to see if you’re becoming a monster, too. If the drudgery of pushing forward through chaos will hollow you out and refuse to fill you back up again.

When she wakes one night, screaming and sobbing, neither of you are happy you happen to be there, and neither would rewrite the moment anew. When you pull out information, long-studied and held in moments of freedom, of unrestricted research, tell her what you know about trauma and recovery, she says, “alright”, with the drop of a tear off her chin as her eyebrows dig into her eyes.

You want to give her something, then: about how people connect and need each other when they don’t know how to be soft anymore, but it’s not something you’ve read, only something you’ve thought. And what spills out from you, clumsy, won’t be enough to convince a mind and sway a soul, you think – and aren’t they the same thing, anyway? –

Because what you’re learning to become isn’t more human.


End file.
